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Alaska Natives at the Time of the Invasions: A Cultural Profile Project Draft 3 Do not quote or copy without permission from Mike Gaffney or from Ray Barnhardt at the Alaska Native Knowledge Network, University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Mike Gaffney suggests that one read the Teacher's Manual Preview first to get a good idea about the purpose and design of this secondary school textbook. Mike Gaffney Chapter 9 Oral history and the Alaska Native perspective. Without a doubt we have gained considerable understanding of Native life in traditional times from the written journals and reports of outsiders present in and around Native communities in those days. There is also little doubt that we have benefited greatly from the published work of modern scholars who have painstakingly complied and analyzed these early eyewitness accounts of Native life. But the eyes and ears of those early outsiders could not be everywhere. Surely there occurred events and activities they neither saw nor heard. Nor can we be confident that these culturally different outsiders were capable of accurately presenting the Native perspective on events and activities they did in fact witness. Often times outsiders convinced themselves that the cultural differences they saw and heard confirmed the superiority of their own institutions and beliefs. This is why paying special attention to Native oral histories is absolutely necessary if we are to even come close to having a complete picture of Alaska Native life in traditional times. And this is why we devote the next several chapters to discussing the uses of oral history and showing why Native oral history is an essential field of study despite the skepticism of many as to its reliability. We will also discuss how proper use of both the written and the oral record can significantly increase our confidence in the historical information we gather about traditional times. Indeed, you are urged to incorporate as much oral history as possible into your work. This includes talking with knowledgeable Native elders in your community whenever possible. To assist you in this effort, following chapters contain practical guidelines for the collection and evaluation of Native oral histories. What historians value most. Historians place the highest value on what they call written primary source material. Societies with literate traditions have passed down from generation to generation a written record of their histories. The Roman Empire, for example, ruled much of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East for five centuries,100 BC to 400 AD. Much of what we know about how the Romans and how they ruled during those times comes from contemporaneous writings. These contemporaneous writings are considered primary source material. [Literate tradition = having a history of reading and writing.]
Alaska Natives and other societies in the world without a literate tradition have also passed down a record of their histories. But it is an oral historical record. Until the late 1970s these Native oral histories have been generally ignored by everybody outside of Native communities where people told and retold their own histories. Until recently, what we have known of traditional Native life came almost completely from the written observations of early explorers, missionaries, traders, and soldiers. It is these written outsider accounts which historians from literate societies have always considered the most reliable primary source historical material. What exactly is primary source historical material? One of America’s leading research libraries is located on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. It provides students with this description:
The U. C. Berkeley Library then gives examples of primary source material. Here are some of those examples:
These examples describe what the U. C. Berkeley Library considers the most reliable kinds of historical research materials. But nowhere do we find oral historical records within their description and examples. Perhaps the closest fit is “interviews” mentioned in the first grouping of primary sources. Even so, it seems like the Library directs us to look only for surviving written records of interviews conducted contemporaneously with the past historical event. The Library’s basic instruction to students doing historical research appears to be: Go find written documents contemporaneous with the event or time period you are researching. Unless your instructor specifically says otherwise, anything else is unacceptable. If a truly great institution of higher learning like the University of California at Berkeley appears to dismiss oral history, what are we to think? What are we to do? After all, much of our knowledge about traditional Native life increasingly comes from the oral histories of tribes. Before we start wrestling with these questions, however, we need to quickly describe the two kinds of oral history – living oral history and oral historical legacy. Living oral history. The oral history familiar to most people is when living participants of a past event or time period orally describe their experiences. The person writing down or taping these oral narratives then organizes what is said into a written document or audio library. We call this living oral history because the participants or witnesses are still alive to tell their stories. We are not hearing or reading these stories as they have been passed down from one generation to another. This is not secondhand information. The tellers of the oral history are actual living primary sources. Within Native American literature, a widely known living oral history is Black Elk Speaks published in 1932. Carefully using a translator, John G. Neihardt wrote down the words of Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux warrior and medicine man who was a living witness to the end of the great Sioux Nation. After describing his childhood and earlier battles, Black Elk talks of the 1876 Battle of the Greasy Grass (the Little Bighorn River) where George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry regiment was soundly defeated by 2000 Teton Sioux (Lakota) and Cheyenne warriors led by such famous chiefs as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Black Elk’s oral history ends with the senseless and appalling massacre of Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek in the winter of 1890. He also describes the spiritual thinking of his people during those times, including the rise of the Ghost Dance movement inspired by the Paiute Indian mystic Wovoka from Nevada.2
In modern times the tape recorder is most often used to document living oral history. Perhaps the modern American writer best known for developing living oral history as an area of significant research is Studs Terkel. His book, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, captures the heartbreaking realities of ordinary people’s lives during a very difficult period in American history. This collection of individual oral accounts offers the kind of up-close-and-personal picture of those “hard times” not likely found in most school books and academic research papers.4 Black Elk Speaks and Mr. Terkel’s book raise an interesting question: Do works relying on living oral histories fit any of the primary source guidelines suggested by the U. C. Berkeley Library? Even though these guidelines seem not to recognize oral history, both of these works certainly comply with the Library’s introductory statement to the guidelines. Recall the Library said the main purpose for using primary sources, “is to get as close as possible to what actually happened during a historical event or time period. A primary source reflects the individual viewpoint of a participant or observer.” Now consider these three points:
Figure
10 Is there any real difference between the U. C. Library’s listing of “autobiographies” and “memoirs” as primary source material and the living oral histories recorded by Neihardt and Terkel? In one, the autobiography or memoir is written by the participant or observer himself. In the other, it is orally narrated to someone who records and publishes it for present and future uses. As for Alaska Native history, there are still living participants of recent Native historical events whose views of these events are well worth recording, perhaps using Mr. Terkel’s work as a model. One example might be recording the ideas and experiences of Native activists and organizers from different regions of Alaska who participated in the land claims struggle of the 1960s. But, alas, our Cultural Profile assignment is about traditional Native life. Since the living oral history approach works only for recording recent times, it obviously does not fit the purposes of our Cultural Profile assignment. Therefore we must rely on another kind of oral history which we call oral historical legacy. Later we develop the idea that historical legacy – whether written or oral – is a vital part of any human group’s worldview and cultural identity. Oral historical legacy. Unlike living oral history which directly records the experiences of still living participants of past times and events, we now want to know about a Native group’s oral historical legacy as passed down through the generations. This means we must shift from thinking about primary historical sources to thinking about what are called secondary sources. Here is how the U. C. Berkeley Library describes a secondary source:
Right now, in fact, you are reading a book that relies heavily on secondary source material. Our use of the historical observations made by Oscar Kawagley in his book A Yupiaq Worldview and later the works of Ernest Burch Jr. are good examples. There is simply no way around the fact that oral historical accounts of traditional times have passed through too many voices to be considered primary source material. To know a Native group’s oral historical legacy means we must rely on secondary source material. We will not find living witnesses of, for instance, the Yup’ik warrior Apanuugpak’s exploits during the Bow and Arrow Wars of the 1700s. Nor will we find living witnesses to tell us about the experiences of the Kiks.ádi tribe of Tlingits during their historic battles with the Russians in 1802 and 1804. So we must first find out what secondary sources are available to us. Where, for example, might we actually find oral accounts of Apanguupak or of the Kiks.ádi Tlingits against the Russians?6 To start with, here are four places we should look:
Oral historical legacies: achieving confidence. We do what all scholars should do with any research material they collect from either primary or secondary sources. We challenge ourselves with this fundamental question:
The key words are “at this point in time.” Because the pursuit of knowledge is an ongoing enterprise, new information and interpretations of historical events will continually arise. This new knowledge may very well produce more complete – even different – historical pictures than the ones we now have in mind. What we know about Native American history today, for example, is certainly much broader and deeper than it was twenty-five years ago. Back then, pioneering programs in Native American studies at universities had difficulty finding satisfactory reading material for many courses they wished to teach. Today this is no longer a major problem. In a moment we will go on an intellectual journey with Tiger Burch. He will describe how his perception of traditional Northwest Iñupiaq life changed radically when he finally began to pay attention to what Native oral historians had to say. Whether doing our own oral historical research or relying on the work of others like Burch, we must at least feel confident that we are working with the best information available to us at the time. To meet this challenge means we must find ways to check the reliability of the information we use. All of us, for example, have taken multiple choice tests in school. Usually one of the instructions given by the teacher is, “if you finish the test early, be sure to go back and check your answers.” We want to do essentially the same thing with our oral histories. If we do the actual collecting of local oral history ourselves, we must find ways to test the reliability of what we have been told. Shortly we will go to Burch for some ideas on how to judge the reliability of the oral histories we might gather. Most likely, however, we will be using oral histories already collected by someone else. If our Native group is interior Athabaskan, we might read the work of Adeline Peter-Raboff on the 19th Century history of the Northern Koyukon, Gwich’in and Lower Tanana. If our selected Native group is Northwest Iñupiaq, obviously we should read the works of Burch. Nevertheless the same checking principle applies. We must ask: To what extent have Peter-Raboff and Burch checked the reliability of the oral histories used by them or told to them directly?9 Again, whether we personally collect the oral history or use someone else’s work, the overall goal is always the same. That goal is to be as confident as possible that the oral histories we use to support what we say in our Cultural Profile about, for example, a traditional Native worldview or shamanism or warfare or family life is as reliable as we can make it at this point in time. Starting with the next chapter, we call on Ernest “Tiger” Burch Jr. for help in understanding why Alaska Native oral histories are absolutely necessary if we are to develop a more complete picture of traditional times. Like the U. C. Berkeley Library, he also offers us a set of guidelines. But his guidelines tell us how to think about Native oral history and how to obtain the most reliable information. What we should be thinking about – key study questions:
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